Stack ranking means that managers rank employees and teams relative to each other in performance. That means for anyone to go up a rung in the performance ranking, their peer has to go down a rung (or several rungs). Thus, backstabbing is incentivized, collaboration is disincentivized, and the company wastes lots of time and money on devs and teams blocking each other's work in the name of making their work look better, relative to their competition. Aside from Amazon and Bloomberg, which companies use stack ranking in evaluating SWE performance?
Salesforce for promos
Some teams in Google will use it informally to help with calibration. The stacks are discarded after.
Cisco does stack ranking always. Each team has ways to record the ranking decision in different ways . Nothing officially
Splunk for the win. 😞
Every single company has stack ranking at company level (bonus pool is fixed). The only difference is how far down the hierarchy it’s pushed, how it is enforced and how public company is about it. If you do not enforce rating curve/stack ranking, you end up like universities with grade inflation where 50% gets A and transcript/gpa is meaningless.
It’s Ok to have grade inflation if the school is extremely hard to get into (Stanford, MIT, CMU). If you’re like Amazon (state school) where everybody with a pulse gets admitted, then you need stack ranking to be brutal.
Wait. How does it work?
Your performance is determined by a 360 feedback filled by your peers. Managers who should be the actual ones who make the decisions are clueless. They have no idea what is happening and hence they use this feedback at face value. So the people who fill the feedback on you and determine your performance are the same ones who compete with you in the rat race.
Wrong question as almost all of companies does it. Ask which companies don’t do it?
The real question is: if I don’t viciously undercut my peers, will I face a loss of income at annual review time?
Tell us exactly how Bloomberg conducts stack ranking. Use examples
All of them
What??